The most bizarre was the president's, in his interview with George
Stephanopoulos, where he indicated there was a kind of a failure to
communicate, a failure to explain this. First of all, the president has
been ubiquitous arguing for this. The longer it's been before the
public, the less support there has been for it.

ROBERTS: You're talking about health care?

WILL: Health care, yes, and this really was a health care
election. Tip O'Neill's axiom that all politics was local was stood on
its head up there. This was a referendum on a particular piece of
legislation that is the signature legislation of the administration, and
the people of Massachusetts and the country are hotly angered over its
substance, but coldly contemptuous of the process that brought it about,
the serial bribery.

ROBERTS: I think it's much more the process than the substance. I
don't think anybody knows what's in the bill. But the -- but I think
everybody is just furious with Washington, and Barack Obama rode that
tide last year, and -- and now he's feeling the waves breaking on him.

The fact is, is that everything that's happening in that beautiful
building right there is making people mad. And -- and Scott Brown was
the beneficiary of that.

MORAN: Do you think George is right that the president doesn't get
it?

DONALDSON: Oh, I think the president gets it after the fact. I
mean, that's always the best time to get it. Cokie's right. I mean,
remember the anchorman, the old one, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going
to take this anymore." That's the way the voters are in this country,
and the great American slogan when that happens is, "Throw the bums
out." The bums at the moment happen to be in. They're the Democrats.
And, therefore, I don't care what your name is, or how much experience
you have or don't have, or what your positions are even. You're the
other guy.

DOWD: Well, what I -- what's funny (inaudible) think it's funny is
that, unlike Las Vegas, what happens in Massachusetts doesn't stay in
Massachusetts, and this is something that's a wave that's moving across
the country.

I think this is a signal for both political parties and members of
Congress in both sides. I think what the country has been saying for
the last few years, when the Republicans held office and the Democrats
took -- came in, they said, "You're not listening to us. You're not
doing what we want. You're not doing the process the way we want."

Barack Obama wins a big election. They expand their majority. And
within a year, the Democrats lose New Jersey, they lose Virginia, and
they lose a Senate race in Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts. And it
wasn't a Republican victory. It was a victory for an outsider that says
Washington doesn't get it, Republicans and Democrats, you guys don't get
it. We're going to try something else.

MORAN: Well, the Republicans seem to think it -- many -- that it
was a Republican victory, just as the Democrats did in 2008. Take a
look at a chart that -- that refutes that a little bit. This is a chart
that shows how people identify themselves. Are they liberal, moderate,
or conservative? Over the course of the last five years, there's
basically been no change -- that's the message, that this country didn't
swing to the left in 2008 and it's not swinging to the right now.